YPN coming very soon

according to early reports from CEO conf. call

Senior Member

I did not hear the conference call myself, but mention of the competing YPN was made by Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, who apparently said that YPN would be rolled out "very soon."

This makes perfect sense as Yahoo reported a huge quarterly profit, most of it (.38 per share) due to sale of Google stock. Here's a snippet from an AP article:

The profit included a gain of $563 million, or 38 cents per share, from the sale of an investment. Yahoo company didn't immediately identify the investment, but the company owns a significant stake in one of its biggest rivals, online search engine leaders Google Inc., whose stock has soared by 61 percent so far this year.

So, if Yahoo has sold it's Google stock, one might assume that they're ready to launch an assault via a competing service. When, as in "very soon" remains to be seen, but Google reports it's quarterly results after the close on Thursday, July 21.

Could Yahoo try to steal some thunder from Google by releasing the YPN prior to G's quarterly? Doubtful, because that might be considered "dirty pool," but announcing the release date right around it might be in the cards. It's got to be within the next month, IMO, as Yahoo won't want to miss out on back to school advertising and get prepared for the Christmas season, which is now less than 5 months off.

My hunch is that they'll unveil it within the next three weeks. Get ready. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Senior Member

joined:May 24, 2003
posts:814
votes: 0

From the transscript.

Search advertising is of course an equally exciting opportunity for us. We became a leading player in just 18 months ago and we see even more opportunity in this area around some of our larger initiatives.

We have a strong road map in place for improving technologies in order to optimize relevance and matching capabilities in our core services globally. During the balance of this year, we will introduce important upgrades in areas such as advertiser and publishing self-service platforms, which we expect will substantially improve our offerings in both content match and sponsored search.

We also plan to offer new contextual targeting capabilities which would enhance our services both on Yahoo! and for small publishers throughout the Web. These initiatives are among the highest priorities within the Company and important investment in Yahoo!'s long-term growth.

Senior Member

joined:Dec 26, 2004
posts:1015
votes: 0

These forums are dying and YPN killed its own forum. They created the buzz and then there is a very mysterious silance.

Of course we want them to take more time and release a better service, however, I think they should at least have the beta running already and allow more sites to participate, to discuss so they can learn our feedback from these discussions.

But, instead, I see more and more people being hopless and going away.

YPN I don't think the delay is in your interest. I think you should have the Beta available for the publishers.

Microsoft had the Beta for it's new search and learned so much from the searchers and webmasters, and then 3-4 months later they released the final product.

Senior Member

Senior Member from US

joined:Feb 25, 2004
posts:945
votes: 38

I've repeatedly stated on the Adsense forum that I couldn't wait to give some pages to YPN when it comes out. I still will if and whenever it does come out just as a means of diversifying income but things are going so well for me with Adsense these last few months YPN would really have to be a spectacular program for me to give them very much traffic. Maybe this delay is helping them improve their program but having announced that the program was coming and now really dragging their feet, they are loosing face and momentum with publishers big time.

(of course "mywebsitename" was in the place of "WebmasterWorldebsitename" ... but I think you get the drift)

Notice the "lccmtools","corp.yahoo.com" ,"cstest" and "&showads"

I've seen all types of traffic from Yahoo, but never anything like this... What else could it be except Yahoo testing their contextual ad program? I suppose they could have the page (my web site's front page) somehow framed like Ask Jeeves does, and their test script might produce whatever appropriate test ads they may have.

Naturally I couldn't connect to anything when I attempted to access the link in my browser... It must be on their internal secure network... my guess.

Quite a few months ago, like many others I suppose, I signed up for Yahoo! news updates on their contextual ad program - but have not yet received any information from Yahoo. I supplied Yahoo with this particular domain because it does rather well in Yahoo for relevant keyphrase searches, but has AdSense on the pages at the moment,

So that would be how Yahoo would know to run their tests on that domain's front page, if indeed that is what they are doing. Other than that, I'm just "reading into" the text in the link taht I see in my logs... pieces of text like "tool,corp.yahoo,test, & showads" ... what the HECK else could it be?

Preferred Member from CH

"...A few million years more (don't wait up, we'll leave the light on)..."

Nice one :)

Maybe we can get Clint involved in finding what's happening with YPN. I'm sure Clint's subtle line of persuasion would be helpful in getting YPN released a little earlier:

CLINT: ".....Me and my .44 Magnum here are getting a little twitchy waiting round for you guys to roll out the YPN......I know what you're thinking.....did I fire six shots or only five? ....Feeling lucky geek?....."

Junior Member

joined:Nov 9, 2004
posts:169
votes: 0

what new products have been announced at an SES conference? I've seen a few predictions in the past of various things that "would" be announced at SES... but the predictions haven't turned out to be true. So I call "crying wolf" -- though I guess technically, as soon as I call "crying wolf" -- the wolf will actually appear. :P